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OF YOU MY HEART HAS SPOKEN

Eamonn Monson SAC

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Showing posts from February, 2019

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THE MAN WHO ROBS YOU: Crucifix Taken and Retrieved

on February 24, 2019

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RAFORD: A Place of Grace

on February 21, 2019

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THE HOLY BATH: A Rite of Passage

on February 20, 2019

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A RIVER IN THE DRY SEASON: Remembering Shirley, Twenty Years On

on February 12, 2019

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Come Take My Hands

on February 11, 2019

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The Solitary Life of a Single Woman

on February 01, 2019

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Jesus Is The Kindly Light

The oddest thing! Walking home in the dark my eye caught sight of a piece of paper trapped at the base of a seafront bench. It was flapping in the wind and it looked somehow familiar. I bent to pick it up. A Pallottine Mass League certificate that was issued at the Pallottine College, Thurles in 1996 when I was a member of the community there. I recognized the script and know who typed it but have no knowledge of the person enrolled. So, I googled his name when I got home. Flight Lieutenant Gregory Mark Noble died at the age of 28 in an RAF air accident which happened in Norfolk in January 1996. Why should this distinctively Pallottine document find its way into the path of the only Pallottine in this town? I find myself praying for him, for his family, for the secretary who typed the cert, her family, for the rector of the college and the community. But mostly I pray for Greg himself and his memory. Such a sad loss of a young life.
Before the paper caught my eye, I had been pondering …

SOMETHING PRECIOUS: Love's Unquestioning Duty

I peer through the curtains of the morning to gaze upon the unwelcome day, then choosing to welcome it in the name of Christ, befriending the unknown that awaits my love. One by unexpected one they arrive by grace.
“You have been trusted to look after something precious; guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.” (2 Timothy 1:14)

A friend has been looking after her ailing father for the past few years and I have seen how exhausted and frayed she becomes, wondering at times where can she find the strength to keep going. But she finds it, she does all that needs to be done. It is her a God-given duty, the duty of her love for him and there is no question of not doing it. It is love’s unquestioning duty and it doesn’t always feel like love.
It’s what Jesus talks about in the Gospel, “when you have done all that you have been told to do, say, “we are merely servants, we have done no more than our duty.” (Luke 17:10) It is our duty to be servants of each other’s need, a lovin…

SOUJOURNER & STRANGER: I Found Myself Again

Moses named his firstborn Gershom because, he said "I am a stranger in a foreign land." Another translation uses the word sojourner, which I prefer. It's what happens to us in Lent - we go deeper as sojourner into the foreign regions of our soul, that part of us that we do not normally inhabit because it is essentially solitary and silent. Sometimes it's more painful than we can bear. And there too we encounter fears that tell us lies to keep us as far away as possible from our true selves and from God. But as Jesus was led by and filled with the Holy Spirit, so are we. Our foreign experiences, our deserts are filled with the same Holy Spirit.
A song that has echoed in me since I was a child - "this world is not my home, I'm just a passin through" - expresses the reality that I have always to some extent experienced myself as a stranger sojourner, a reluctant inhabitant of this earth with a sense of unbelonging.
That is not to say that I am unhappy. …

INSOMNIA: They Who Fly Home To God

"Insomnia can become a form of contemplation. You just lie there, inert, helpless, alone, in the dark, and let yourself be crushed by the inscrutable tyranny of time. The plank bed becomes an altar and you lie there without trying to understand any longer in what sense you can be called a sacrifice." (Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas)

Insomnia! A brand of coffee and a state of being! Being awake when you should be asleep. It's been part of my whole life since childhood, though it's less of an affliction now. Most religious people seem to resort to formal prayer like the rosary to help them through the dark hours. Not me! I just groan - "oh God!"

One such night many years ago my distress was so great that I sat up, took hold of my Bible and asked God to speak to me. What opened before me was Ezekiel Chapter 13, and I was particularly struck by verse 10: "...they have misled my people by saying Peace! when there is no peace."
My inclination is toward…

FIRST OF MAY: When I Was Small

When I was small we all looked forward to the first of May – long before the Bee Gees wrote their beautiful song - when the leaves were fresh on the trees and the sun seemed to shine most of the time, though sometimes it rained heavily as we made our daily pilgrimage to the Grotto in Castlegar, about two miles from home. We were right on the edge of Galway city and it was over the wall and through the fields that we made our way, taking time to play among the rock and bushes, dreaming up great fantasies and dramas from snake valley to mansions and boats carved out of stone. It was a time when faith was woven fairly seamlessly into ordinary life as we were keenly aware of the Divine in our midst and we turned to the Mother of Christ for help in everything we had to undertake. For us children as we grew into secondary school, we needed her help with exams. We went to her in droves every day after school, though I didn’t fare too well in exams even after the most fervent of praying but it…

The Solitary Life of a Single Woman

Mary, a neighbour at home died recently. She was about a year younger than me and lived three doors away, lived there most of our sixty-something lives. There are two brothers and a sister, married with their own families but Mary remained single and lived at home alone for many years since her parents died.
A solitary life, even an isolated one. No one in the avenue ever seemed to get close to her, there was no sign of friends coming to see her. We were not close, though we would always have a chat at her gate when I’d be home. The talk was mostly about her health because she had been fighting cancer for quite a few years and I would promise to pray for her. Her response to this promise of mine one day was, “you’re a liar, you’re a liar!” Maybe I wasn’t praying enough. Maybe she was telling the truth.
But I did think of her and pray when in my mind I would go around the sixteen terraced houses in the avenue and I would feel what I thought must be her loneliness, though maybe she wa…

DAD

FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY

This time 28 years ago – December 29th - on the eve of the Holy Family Maura and I were in hospital visiting Dad who had taken ill on St. Stephen's Day and was being checked out. As we were leaving him, she and I looked at each other and said "he's dying." There was something in his eyes that made us both think this. So, we went to the nurse in charge and said we thought our father was dying. She said, "not at all. He's fine." And we went off home.
When I told Mam what Maura and I were thinking she said, "well if you think he's dying then go back and anoint him." This we did and when the praying was done two interesting things happened. First Mam took hold of his hand but he took it away as if to say this is not the time for holding but the time for letting go. Then he pulled the bed clothes up under his chin looking content and complete and told us to go off and get a drink for ourselves. We did!
And at home we …

RAFORD: A Place of Grace

I’m remembering Raford, the house on the hill in the country that was my mother’s birthplace, and I’m thinking of the clear cold water from the rain barrel at the gable end, cold water scooped up in a white enamel basin put standing on the kitchen table. White soap in a saucer and a blue towel to wipe away from my face the shock of the cold water of the morning. Granny cut slices of brown bread made by her own hands, the wholemeal wholeness of her heart in it and lavished with salty country butter churned by the same hands and mine. Everything and everybody was washed in rainwater and we went to the well down the lane to draw that which would quench our thirst and wet the tea. We brought tea in a billy can across the fields to Grandad in the bog and helped him load the cart with turf, sitting on top of it for the journey home, staring down into the black water of the bog holes, terrified that the cart would turn over when its wheels went to the very edge. It never did and we never fell …

NOEL O'CONNOR: A Child At Rest

It’s one of those moments when solitude bites - that most blessed gift of God that I treasure. It’s when loneliness overwhelms me and there is no one there to absorb it with me, no human face-to-face physical presence. And nothing on earth will relieve it, only God who doesn’t relieve it quickly but stretches it out so that I actually experience it. I’m not the only one and it’s not the worst loneliness going on in the world– but it’s mine, right now. And it hurts! It happened following my visit to Noel in the hospice, something I’ve already written about but will repeat again here. His brothers JJ and Patrick and niece Fiona were there. Noel slept peacefully so the rest of us chatted until he stirred, woke and looked at us without speaking. I knelt beside his bed, we held hands, I placed my right hand on his head and we prayed. It felt like we were intimately enfolded in one Heart. I asked Jesus to take our hands, our priestly hands and use them as His own, that the Light of His Love…

The Call of St. Matthew (Caravaggio)

When Jesus enters the room
My hands are still on the money
Fingers fiddling

My mind distracted by it
My soul oppressed by its demands
My heart tangled in its deception

Then glancing sideward
I see the Hand outstretched
Finger pointing like a new creation’s
Dawning light

And when He speaks
It is clear that I cannot
Serve both God and money
It is He that I must follow

However harrowed be my life

I grow younger as I near Him
A beauty ever ancient
Emerges ever new

Sitting with Him at table
We sinners are drawn in
To an intimacy Most Divine

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